RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dr. Albert Ellis, one of the world’s top psychologists, suggests that the study of past track records is an essential undertaking for an effective assessment of the future: “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.” 

This suggestion is also applicable to the assessment of policy formulation by the next US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who will be the most influential foreign and national security policy-maker in President-elect Joe Biden’s Administration.

Blinken’s close ties with Biden, dating back to Biden’s chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, make him, potentially, as influential as were Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Jim Baker during the presidency of Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush respectively.

Israel policy.  Blinken opposes Israel’s annexation of – and expanded Jewish presence in – any part of Judea and Samaria, as well as in Jerusalem beyond the 1949 ceasefire lines. He considers Israeli dramatic land concessions to be a prerequisite for peace.  He supports the establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the pre-1967 Jordan-occupied-Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem. However, according to Blinken, “US aid to Israel is beyond debate and should never be used as leverage to influence Israel’s policies toward Palestinians…. It’s in the US interest that Israel has the means to secure itself…. Israel’s security is challenged on a daily basis. Israel faces existential threats every single day.”  

Palestinian policy. Blinken assumes that a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and East Jerusalem would serve justice and would spare Israel a demographic calamity. He ignores the well-documented demographic reality, which exposes the myth of the Arab demographic timebomb. He approaches the Palestinian issue from the human rights angle, notwithstanding the Palestinian track record as a role model for anti-Jewish hate-education and incitement, 100-year-old anti-Jewish terrorism and intra-Arab terrorism and treachery. Irrespective of Middle East reality, he believes in the centrality of the Palestinian issue on the Arab agenda and the pursuit of Israel-Arab peace.  
Blinken aims to restore annual financial aid to the Palestinian Authority (which was suspended due to the PA’s financial support of families of terrorists and the systematic heralding of terrorists), as well as the annual financial transfer to UNRWA (which was suspended due to its funding of the PA’s hate education). Also, he will reopen the PLO office in Washington, DC.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thursday is Thanksgiving, a uniquely American holiday. (And, with sheltering in place, unique to this year!) Like Christmas and Easter, it is a religious holiday, as the Pilgrims who we celebrate, and who landed in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts 400 hundred years ago this month, were escaping religious persecution. But, while the Pilgrims were Christians, this holiday is spiritual in a broader sense. The God we thank when we sit down to feast may be whatever God we choose. After all, according to a 2019 Pew Research survey a third of Americans – 35% – do not consider themselves Christian, but all celebrate Thanksgiving. So, no matter one’s religion, if any, all give thanks for the good fortune to live in this Country. 

The Pilgrims were Puritan refugees from England, where they had wanted a simpler and purer church than the Church of England offered. They went to Leiden, Holland around 1610, but returned to England to sail from Plymouth to the new world, in September 1620. Not one of the 102 passengers or 30 crew members would have made that trip without a belief that God would guide them. They crossed three thousand miles of unchartered ocean to an unknown destination, to arrive in November as winter was taking hold.

The Mayflower Society, made up of 150,000 descendants, estimates there are 35 million people who could trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower. The concept of the power of compound interest proves the point. Of the passengers and crew members, about one third died that first winter. Most of the rest (about 80 people) stayed. Since I can trace my ancestry back to William Bradford, I know that I am, through his son and granddaughter Mercy Steele, the 11th generation – William Bradford would be my nine-greats grandfather, his genes diluted by the fact that I also carry the genes of another 2047 nine-greats grandparents![1] (Apparently through William Bradford, Clint Eastwood and Hugh Heffner are cousins!) While many children died in infancy, most families were large, as children were assets. If one assumes, for sake of argument, that each family had three children and that twenty-three of the seventy-five survivors had children one gets to 35 million in the 13th generation, my grandchildren’s generation.[2] The actual number of Mayflower descendants may be far higher. Other ships, carrying mostly British subjects, began arriving in 1621. Conclusion: The Mayflower Society, to which I do not belong, is not exclusive.

https://dianebederman.com/covids-privileged-oppressors/

Covid’s privileged oppressors are sanctimonious, self- righteous, self -serving people of every race, colour creed and sexual orientation; most often found in mainstream media, politics, Hollywood, and some in the general public. They rant and rave and lecture us about masks and social distancing and hand washing, scream about the number of new Covid cases and Covid deaths (would that be deaths from Covid or deaths with Covid?) and then yell at the rest of us for not following the rules (as if they do), while threatening lockdowns and then locking down.

All of these lockdowns are easy for Privileged Oppressors; politicians, public health experts and the well-to-do. They will not suffer from them. Their lives have not changed. I know people who spent the Covid lockdown redecorating and remodelling their homes. In the summer right up to mid-November, they played golf and went bike riding. Their lives are just fine, thank you. I doubt they have ever spoken to a shop owner holding on by his fingernails who knows he cannot withstand another lockdown. But they are quick to attack those who do not follow the rules. Blaming them for Covid.

These Privileged Oppressor politicians and public health experts get a regular and often rather large pay-cheques (Governor Cuomo is getting a $25,000 raise) and preach to others while not following their own preaching. Think California Governor, Gavin Newsome(fancy dinner party), Nancy Pelosi (she had to have her hair done),Chicago Mayor Lighthouse (needed her hair done as well), Gov. Whitmer (non-stop lockdowns and laws while her husband flaunts them).

https://www.jns.org/opinion/anti-semites-combating-anti-semitism-an-orwellian-farce/

“Anti-Israel” may be the new “pro-Israel,” but proponents of the bait-and-switch don’t seem to be camouflaging their Jew-hatred as well as they’d hoped.

If George Orwell is spinning in his grave these days, he’s likely rolling so hard with laughter that it’s bringing him and the rest of us to tears. An upcoming webinar on Jew-hatred is but one of many recent examples of phenomena that even the prescient social critic, whose essays and novels predicted with chilling accuracy the world that has unfolded since World War II, couldn’t have anticipated.

The Dec. 15 event—called “Dismantling Antisemitism, Winning Justice”—is being hosted by the left-wing, anti-Israel NGO Jewish Voice for Peace, and moderated by JVP and JVP Action deputy director Rabbi Alissa Wise.

Its equally radical co-sponsors are JVP Action, If Not Now, United Against Hate, Jewish Currents, Foundation for Middle East Peace, Arab American Institute, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, the Jewish Vote, and the People’s Collective for Justice and Liberation.

According to JVP, anti-Semitism “is used to manufacture division and fear, [and] while anyone can fuel it, [it] always benefits the politicians who rely on division and fear for their power.”

The group didn’t have to specify which “politicians” it has in mind, but it’s obvious that they are in the camp of U.S. President Donald Trump. The stated aim of the online happening is to “explore how to fight back against anti-Semitism and against those that seek to wield charges of antisemitism to undermine progressive movements for justice.”